Placing a tattoo
A forearm tattoo
To me, more often than not the placement of a tattoo comes before the art itself. Of course, as a calligrapher, it took me a while to get to the point where I understood how central placement is to tattooing. For years, I saw the human body as a somewhat uncomfortable canvas for my art. Far from being the ideal empty square canvas mounted on a wooden frame, it had its own demands and ideas, distracting me from my art.
Placing thousands of my artworks on bodies, though, a vague understanding of how our bodies flow and where within this flow this or the other work should be placed in order to have an impact grew in me.
A tattoo normally tells a story. The tattoos I draw always do. More often than not, they are reminders and touchstones or markers of identity. The first question I ask myself when listening to the story of a client, is: where within the flow of their body is this story at home?
A story can, for example, be at home on somebody's forearm. The forearm is where we interact with the world. This is where intention and energy flows outwards. A reminder to act upon your values is well placed on your forearm. So is a work telling the story of passing on those values to the next generation.
A different work may be much more at home on someone's back. Our backs are where our past resides. And our spine line connects us on the vertical axis. It's the flow that connects us to our roots, but at the same time to what is above us. So a tattoo telling the story of our ancestry, maybe of intergenerational growth or trauma, or of the roots we received from those who came before us, would be well placed on our backs. So would be a tattoo representing our connection to the divine and maybe divine guidance.
At the center of the chest I would place anything that represents connection with ourselves, with our core, our authentic identity. And at the front, we have a similar vertical flow as on our backs, but it's shorter. And it’s much more visible, much more present for the tattooee.
A story, of course, is normally not unidimensional. The story of passing on our values to the next generation is as well the story of being connected to those who passed those values down to us. A story of connection with the divine is as well a story of how we interact with the world. And there are connection points and overlapping areas, parts of our skin that belong to more than one “canvas”.
A back tattoo
So there is hardly ever a clear, intuitive, single answer to the question “so where should this story be drawn out?”
But the more I draw, the more I want to start any conversation about a tattoo project with figuring out the placement. More often than not, the art conceptualizes itself once I figure out where on a body the story will be told.
